For anyone out there that saw my "sneak peek" at the LISA conference last year, you'll be expecting this. For the other folks out there - surprise! Why? Well, 8.0.0-beta1 has some very major changes compared to 7.2.7. All of it is related to the new configuration file format which allows for things such as read-write and read-only access to consoles, per-console options that were global before (like -F, the auto-reinitialize option), user groups, per-conserver access lists, and inheritance of config items. Unfortunately, a lot of that may make no sense until you see it 'cause I haven't gotten all the docs updated to match the code. *But*, I do believe the code to be fully functional (yeah, to the extent I could test it) and I'm hoping a few of you are interested in testing it as well.

If you'd like to see examples of the new config file, scan the bits of docs I have updated, or even go as far as doing a 'make test' on a system, you can find the beta at http://www.conserver.com/beta/ (or in the beta sub-dir on the ftp site).

Personally, I'm very excited about the possibilities this is going to open up for the code (many things were limited by the old configuration file format). I'm also very interested in hearing feedback, results, or questions, so feel free to email me (obviously things are still changing). Here are the things I listed in the CHANGES file:

version 8.0.0-beta1 (Jul 4, 2003): - ***NOTICE*** the format of conserver.cf and conserver.passwd has completely changed. see the INSTALL file for upgrade instructions (it should be "fairly painless"). some documentation has been updated to reflect the new world, some hasn't - my goal for beta2 is to have all the docs updated - many command-line options now also conserver.cf options options - POSIX termios interface now required for compilation - some POSIX requirements were already in the code and others will undoubtedly creep in as time goes by - configure --with-regex option removed because of conserver.cf and conserver.passwd changes - added -S option to server for syntax checking of the configuration file - suggested by Dave Stuit <djs [at] tellme> - authorized users now either have r/w or r/o access to consoles - getpassword.o replaces getpass() and getpassphrase() so we can get any string length - fixed rm commands in test script - patch by Petter Reinholdtsen <pere [at] hungry>